Smartthings ethernet port speed

True when your PC communicates to that device in particular. False in any other way.

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Iā€™m not talking about hubs. My archer C2 suffers from this, the same as many other ā€œconsumer gradeā€ routers. Iā€™ve been involved in repairing computers and networking for over 25 years so doing some reading isnā€™t really necessary. When I have time, I can send proof if itā€™s really necessary, or you could test it yourself

Nope. the PC communicates to all LAN devices, and WAN in 100mb. switches back to 1Gb when the smartthings, or other 10/100mb device disconnects.

If you turn off autonegotiation on your pc does it still step down?

sorry, iā€™m not talking about the link speed, that remains at 1Gb regardless. The actual data transfer speed changes when a 10/100 device connects / disconnects

How do you know?

because iā€™ve ran tests

Then youā€™re network has a problem in being different then everybodyā€™s.

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if you say so

@mikeyb5753 - sorry, but I have to agree with everyone else. I have never had a network switch reduce all traffic speeds to the slowest device attached to a network. That just is not how network switches work. I have many 1 gigabit devices attached to my network, as well as plenty of 100 megabit devices. They all run up to their rated speeds, except when communicating to one of the slower devices.

I use consumer grade gigabit network switches that cost less than $20 a piece, and have about 5-6 of them throughout the house, attached to a consumer grade Asus router. Nothing high-end or enterprise class here.

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perhaps it only applies to routers then. Both my ISP supplied router and my archer C2 do it. nothing out of the ordinary about my setup to cause this so it must be a limitation of the router.

There are a few things at play.

First is the line speed of each connection, there is also the switching speed of your network switch. It is possible to get a 4 port gigabit switch and though it can link at that speed not be able to provide it. My suggestion is get a better router. I would suggest just replacing your archer C2 with a Google Wi-Fi puck and a netgear gs608 8 port gigabit switch. I can confirm it has 16gbps backplane speed so each port can transfer at full speed in full duplex and is about $30 in many places.

A well designed switch, even consumer grade, will run at full speed on each port no matter what is connected.

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It appears to be a problem specific to the Archer C2 router, as another user posted similar issues in another forum shown below. If he connected a 100Mbps Raspberry Pi via Cat5 to his Archer C2, it also slowed down his other systems to 100Mbps. Interestingā€¦

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This is incorrect. Wireless can suffer from slower speeds on the same band, however wired ethernet does not. You can have devices connected as 10 mb/s, 100mb/s, and 1000mb/s and the slower speed ethernet ports will not affect the speeds of the faster ports. For switches and hubs the limiting factor for speed is the backplane bandwidth of the hub/switch.

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I think he knows now and hopefully have updated his router sinceā€¦

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Back on topic (albeit an old one), is it possible that it controls itā€™s link speed? I swear Iā€™ve seen it connect at gigabit before, at least according to my router (X6 R8000). I noticed the amber light many times and just assumed the hub was 10/100 only but Iā€™ve also noticed the port light display double green for gigabit and the port indicator light on the router turned white occasionally. The next time it happens Iā€™ll try to remember to snap a photo of it. Iā€™m also certain Iā€™m not confusing the port with another device because the ST hub is the only 10/100 device in my network.

ok, so I know this post is fairly old but after reading ALL of the comments, Iā€™m pretty much sick to my stomach. I am a network engineer and have been for 22 years. Letā€™s set the record straight right now about Ethernet port speeds, hubs vs switches, and how they all workā€¦

Firstly, if youā€™re not familiar with the IEEE 802.3 spec or think if you google something about it really quickly that you can speak on it, please just stop.

Secondly, hubs rarely exist today. Back in those days, bandwidth was shared across anything plugged into the ports mainly because a hub is ā€œdumbā€. That means a hub does not understand CSMA/CD or have an ARP tableā€¦See https://computer.howstuffworks.com/ethernet7.htm for an explanation. In otherwords, a hub will allow all devices to talk at the same time essentially making very poor use of any available bandwidth(also called collision). Think of this as a crowd full of people trying to all talk at the same time.

Because of this, the networking world developed something called a switch. A switch takes ethernet frames from a device and stores the MAC address from that device into a table. This table maps which port that MAC address came from. So, when a device needs to speak to another, the switch checks the ARP table(address resolution protocol table which is one part of Layer 2 of the OSI model) and will send the message directly to the device. Because a device can talk directly to another using the ARP table, bandwidth across the switch is now conserved and that bandwidth between those two devices is now dedicated to those two devices. Depending on the switch, the backplane, and the specs(how many PPS or packets per second that backplane can handle, I.E. hardware limitations) will determine how much dedicated bandwidth per port the switch will give per device.

When we talk about 10/100/1000Mbps and full vs half duplex, weā€™re talking about how fast the devices can talk(10/100/1000Mbps) as well as if both can talk at the same time(full duplex) or if one is forced to listen before it can talk(half duplex which brings in the CSMA/CD I mentioned above).

That being said, even with the cheapest switches(mostly the junk you find at Best Buy etc that are also mostly called unmanaged which means you cannot directly log into the switch to configure vlans etc) utilize CSMA/CD and ARP tables t some degree and can allow direct conversations from one device to another. Again, the hardware, backplane etc will determine how quickly the switch can process/pass the frames across. This means just because a device is operating at 100Mbps doesnā€™t mean it will slow down EVERYTHING else!

The only thing that will affect you if one device is operating at 1000Mbps full duplex and another is operating at 100Mbps full duplex is the conversation those two have directly. It is false and incorrect to think EVERYTHING drops to 100Mbps if one device out of many others at set to this on the switch. Keep in mind 1000Mbps is 10 times faster than 100Mbps so the theoretical throughput of a device using 1Gbps(1000Mbps AKA 1 gigaBIT per second or 1000 MegaBITS per second) is 125MBps(125 MegaBYTES per secondā€¦8 bits in 1 byte so 1000 MegaBITS divided by 8 equals 125 MegaBYTES).

I hope this helps educate everyone here.

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And the purpose of this educational info is?

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@joearch2010

His description is correct!!

At work, We used to keep one hub in a drawer (probably thrown out by now) because you cannot get them anymore and there was once or twice we needed it for debugging network stuff, a hub sends all traffic to all devices, makes debugging easier.

Hopefully to end the switch vs hub ā€˜discussionā€™ WRT how they work when they are each connected to devices of varying speed capabilities (10/100/1000Mbps).